The Lines Were Never Straight
by snappleducated
Summary: A story about people caving in, together, because love is a landslide and there are no survivors. (The youngest and smallest of four: Sasayan is good at not getting what he wants.) — Sasayan, Natsume


**ENTITLED**: The Lines Were Never Straight  
**FANDOM**: Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun  
**LENGTH**: TOO LONG.  
**SETTING**: Spans the course of ten years, ages 16-26.  
**DISCLAIMER**: Ice weasels gnaw my brain.  
**NOTES**: I've been working on and off on this for a while, mostly because I only ever let myself work on it when I was under the influence of cheap champagne. This is actually not a valid excuse at all. DRINK RESPONSIBLY, KIDS!  
**NOTES2**: So how's it going? I'm pretty good. When I wasn't buried by my overly ambitious course load, I spent my last few weeks of term seducing another shorty. As a result, have befriended most of my college's fire department. This sounds pretty exciting but most of them are just dorks. Just as I began to make progress, the guy I have been waiting a year for comes waltzing back into my life. Absurd. Ignoring all boys until they grow into a sense of basic decency. New OTP: Me/Money.  
**SUMMARY**: A story about people caving in, together, because love is a landslide and there are no survivors. (The youngest and smallest of four: Sasayan is good at not getting what he wants.) — Sasayan, Natsume

* * *

At sixteen he is still the youngest and smallest of four. Sasayan is good at not getting what he wants.

Natsume's mouth is stained, and pinched up around her popsicle. A part of him wants to take a bite. Of what, is ambiguous.

"Is it good?"

She shrugs, "It tastes purple. You know. Too sweet."

He does know. When he was a kid he'd liked his purple medicine so much that one time he'd drank the whole bottle and thrown up and almost died. One time.

She looks very pretty in her yukata, in an unreal kind of way. Like a doll. Her popsicle melts down her fingers and she sucks them clean. If he holds her hand now, their fingers will stick together. He wants to. He imagines them stuck together for the rest of his life and he knows that the thought should horrify him but it doesn't, it really doesn't, especially when he thinks about the empty opposite.

For a second he almost reaches out.

The fireworks explode overhead. Natsume yelps and cranes her chin up, dancing back on her toes, tottering around on her high sandals. She grips his shoulder automatically for balance, for a second he touches her waist. She drops her face and turns to him and her eyes are enormous and her eyelashes look soft. Her mouth is pursed and surprised.

"Did you want to find the others?" Sasayan asks, and hates himself for asking, hates himself for always easing over the tension instead of letting it ride out. Natsume blinks. For a second he thinks he would die for her, and then just as quickly remembers how ludicrous and selfish and false a thing like that is.

_Boom_. An exclamation of pink, half-baked stars. They light up all the warm parts of her face. He spends his life forgetting and remembering her beauty.

"No, that's okay," she says, and her hand drops from him shoulder to wrap and twist with the hem of her sleeve, and they do not exactly touch but they stand very close, and around them, couples are kissing. Above them, the sky is blown up with lights.

Natsume gasps. She looks up. He looks at her.

Her forgotten popsicle slides down the stick, and slushes into the dust.

* * *

Seventeen, the batting center after school. "Have you ever been in love?"

He just stares at her, at the back of her head, her silky hair, her long neck, all the things he wasn't allowed to touch. "Are you trying to torture me?"

Natsume makes a hard, annoyed noise, and she doesn't look at him. Maybe he's embarrassed her. "I mean _love_."

He grinds his teeth. He laughs, "Would you take me more seriously if I was taller?"

"You wouldn't be you if you were tall." Natsume harrumphs. She flips the page of her manga. It's comforting to hear that so much of his essence is based upon his vertical growth achievements. Sasayan looks up at the ceiling, listens to the clock's hands move around.

"I didn't love the girl I dated in middle school."

"Hmph," Natsume grunts. She holds her manga closer to her face. He considers the subtle bump of vertebrae just below her skin, the exquisite beginning of her spine. Nothing he could ever have or know.

"What about you, Natsume?" he asks, and flicks out one of his feet to graze her side. She cheeps and scoots away from him, her expression nasty, her cheeks pink and warm.

"O-Of course!"

"Oh?" a dark and cruel part of him doesn't believe her. She sputters and reddens further. Somewhere, someone misses the ball, and it rattles against the chain partition.

"Of course I have! You were there for it!" she uses her hands to swivel her body around to face him, bottom still fastened to the floor. Sasayan leans forwards, his elbows against his knees, and he considers the angry earnestness of her expression. He weighs her heart against his own.

"Hm," he grunts, finally, and does not reach out to push that unruly lock of hair from her face. Except then he does, because doing so makes him feel quiet inside.

He doesn't kiss her then, but in a month, he will. And for a year, he knows the satisfaction of being easily, uncomplicatedly in love.

* * *

Then they graduate and neither of them knows what to do.

Sasayan gets an offer from a school because his grades are bad but not abysmal, and he's still the best baseball player on his team, small or not. Natsume's grades are abysmal and she doesn't play baseball.

He spends several days scheming how they'll stay together. He lands both of them interviews at a retailer and the pay is good enough for a cheap apartment and food, and he is just about to tell her all of this when she says, "I'm going to Kyoto."

He doesn't know what to say about that and he means to say nothing but somehow the word, "Why," comes mumbling, hobbling out into existence. Her eyes light up with tears and anger.

"Because—because—I heard I could get a modeling job there."

"You could get a modeling job anywhere," Sasayan says, and then realizes that what she means is, she wants to leave him.

Things go distant.

He can hear himself breathing on the inside of his head, and the sound just gets louder, and louder, and his hands are hard and pressed against his thighs, and she looks at him desperately. He understands nothing. He is baffled by his own fear, the jarring sprint his heart has leapt into, the nervous way his teeth press together, stilling the quiver that threatens a chatter.

Fear.

"I just want to have—to have—something else. Some experiences."

"_What_ experiences?" he asks blankly.

"I don't know!" she shouts. "I don't know, but I want to _have_ some!" Her lips scrunch together and she looks like she hates herself and he has never been good at standing that. His fists unwind themselves, and he touches the air above her wrist. He lets her go.

"Okay," he says. "Okay, I get it. It's alright. It's alright." He puts his hands on her shoulders and tries to push them down, to smooth the tremors and the shakes out of her body, like so many wrinkles. "Hey, it's okay. I'm not mad. I sort of—I mean, I knew. I just didn't like it. This isn't your fault."

"I will _never_ forget you," she says, almost ferociously. Little crumbling bits of mascara and eyeliner and sparkling dust have begun to trail down from the corners of her eyes. She is so beautiful and so far away that looking at her makes his stomach ache.

He doesn't want this.

"No matter how far apart we are," she goes on, her eyes shining in the way that every girls' eyes shine when they think they're in love, "that doesn't matter to me. I'll remember. You'll always be—"

"Natsume, come on," he hears himself say, because he hadn't meant to, he hadn't meant to say _anything_, but his mouth and the smile it forms feel very, very far away from him. The afterthought of an afterthought, two layers of separation. All he knows is, his hands itch, and he has to go. He takes one step away from her, and hates himself. "We grew up in the same place. We'll probably run into each other all the time. You'll see me again."

He smiles. His insides are chalky and crumbling, and what he feels now is only the anticipation of what is to come, the repressed terror of imminent destruction.

He helps her pack, and three days later, waits outside her gate while she kisses her family goodbye. Then he carries her bags to the station.

The hardest part of being eighteen is the day he has to watch her get on the train, and not follow. The hardest part is when she turns at the last second and digs her face into his shirt and he can feel her tears through the fabric and the brittle push of her fingers. The hardest part is knowing how easy it would be, just three steps forward. The hardest part is watching the doors close and realizing that she isn't going to look out the window at him, that he can just go on staring at the back of her head, at the lost figure of the girl he gave up. Her shoulders look small and breakable. For a second he is almost nauseated at the thought of something happening to her, and not knowing.

His hands are fists in his pockets. He wonders why they had to live in a world full of people, people that would fill her up and wear her down until there wouldn't be room for him anymore, up in her head. He'd call and she'd call back and then one day she wouldn't, and he'd fade, and fade, face first and then name and them maybe everything. Everything would just be gone. Who was he, to expect her to value him more than the rest of her life? Who was he, to want her to chose him over everything else when it came time to sort through memories, and decide what went into storage and what would be lost?

He remembers everything about her, even the stuff he doesn't want or need to. Embarrassing things. Things he pretended not to know—"What kind of soda do you want?" she always wanted the citrus ones.

Everything.

The train leaves with his fear. He goes home and plays videogames for three hours. With slowly realized anguish, his heart breaks.

* * *

He spends his first year of college Getting Over It, playing baseball, and he tells himself that the most important thing is learning to let go of her, learning to let go of the thing that he had spent so long tricking himself into believing was necessary. People were just people and Natsume was just a person, just a girl, and the world was full of girls and he was young and she was—she was an exceptionally pretty one, but that didn't count for so much in the end, _really_, and

His head fills up with her snot-nosed face, her muffled defiance as she said goodbye into his shirt, her voice unwavering and steady, and the sort-of knowledge that maybe she didn't need him as much as he needed her, that now he was standing and watching a girl walk off with a handful of heart ripped from his chest, and how was anyone supposed to survive _that_?

How was anyone supposed to survive one another?

He only lets himself call her once a month. The second time it goes straight through to her voicemail, he stops altogether. A shaking panic grows in his chest when he looks at her contact information on his cell phone's screen. Towards the end of his fall semester, her pictures start showing up on the net, and then a few quiet fan sites. He watches her knees grow increasingly prominent, while the rest of her slips away, and he doesn't sleep and he doesn't think straight and after a while he starts wondering if maybe he's going crazy.

When he doesn't get off at his train's stop, he realizes that he has.

He'd hurt his shoulder in practice earlier that day, and the ice packages strapped to his upper arm have the older aunties clucking their tongue and patting at him. He still looks young, he figures. The lights of the city click past him. At the next platform he gets on a train for Kyoto, and stands with his back to the city, staring out the dark window, through the lonely space of the world around him.

When he gets off at what he guesses is the right stop, he calls her, and she doesn't answer. His ice packs have melted. He throws them away and his arm hurts in a way that satisfies him.

He wanders around the station for a bit and doesn't let himself call her again. He buys a can of soda and presses it against his injury until the can, too, begins to warm. He drinks, and the sugar is grainy on his teeth. He convinces himself that he's given up and after a solid five hours of trying to exhale what already feels like an empty feeling, he gets back on the train.

She sends him a text a few hours later, when he's halfway home, and he almost replies. But he doesn't, because he begins to realize that in the end, the thing he's been left with doesn't matter. The real her is still there, locked up in a corner of his mind, and there she would stay. In his memory, they are sixteen, and foolish, and not quite brave. He supposes that they will stay there together until he is dead. And then there will truly be nothing left between them at all.

* * *

When Sasayan turns twenty, he dates a girl named Saaya, who's all Harujuku. It takes her two hours to get dressed every morning and he loves her, but only kind of. They meet at a mixer his team's captain drags him out on, after Sasayan's secured a varsity spot on the baseball team. Saaya laughs with her hands over her mouth and looks down when she blushes. Everyone at the table seems to understand something that Sasayan doesn't, but he's smart enough to fake the right atmosphere, and the drinks that his captain orders for him are sweeter than the cheap beer he's had a few times, and easier to drink. One of them is a deep purple, and for an unrealized second, the blurred memory of Natsume and her festival popsicles stumbles into his mind.

In his memory, her eyes have that same fragile burn, but her eyelashes are lower, and the popsicle melts down her fingers to trace a slow, sweet path up the pale flesh of her wrist and forearm, finally gathering and languishing in the crease of her elbow and he opens his mouth and closes his eyes and

His tongue scrapes the bottom of his martini glass. The two girls with Saaya shriek with giggles, while Saaya herself looks at him with warm appraisal, and says, "You little _cat_."

His captain orders another round. Sasayan finishes this drink too. It's orange. His collar feels stiff with heat. One of the girls' fake eyelashes comes askew, but nobody seems to notice except Sasayan, and he tries to explain but instead doubles over the table in shaking, rough laughter, until someone pulls him away.

His eyes squeezed together, he follows the leading hand with blind, stumbling steps, until the night air hits his face, and a girl's voice whispers, "Hey, why are you crying?"

He can't answer her. Things are strange and out of order. A rush of fond appreciation for sweet, concerned Saaya bubbles up through his chest, and he pats at her shoulders and cheeks, babbling, "I'm not, I'm not, I'm just, wow. Just laughing. I don't really drink. You're nice to look out for me."

"Okay," she says. She weaves back in forth. He isn't sure is she's moving, or if he is. "You should probably throw up," she says.

"No."

"Trust me, you should. No one's looking."

Sasayan considers. He's heard stories from his brothers.

"Walk away a bit," he pleads, and waits for the sound of her tottering heels to recede a little before he sticks his fingers down his throat.

For a minute, he's awful. And then instantly better. She writes her number on the back of his hand, and he forgets that he ever thought about Natsume at all.

Except his forgetting doesn't matter, when he thinks it again anyway.

His second brother gets married in the spring, and for some reason when Sasayan goes home, he dodges taking Saaya with him to meet his family. While the family's distracted planning ways to set up the reception, he takes long, pointless bike rides around town, with his eyes wide open, and he passes Natsume's house every time, sometimes even on accident, but the curtains to her room stay shut, and he knows that she isn't there, and he knows that Saaya is one hundred and three miles away, and that she loves the color purple, except he can't remember if Natsume does too or doesn't, and he feels stupid.

* * *

To keep his varsity position, he tears the muscles of his shoulder over and over again, never giving enough time for the injury to heal right, and the buildup of scar tissue leaves his arm's movements stiff, and uncertain. What's worse is, he isn't getting any taller, and he can't bulk up like some of the other boys.

"It's fine, not everyone's a power hitter," his captain tells him after practice, and the guy is nice enough to help Sasayan secure the icepacks. "You need to take it a little easy though, you know? If you push yourself any harder, you're really going to do some damage you can't come back from."

"I can't play after college."

"You could—"

"No," Sasayan says, with certainty. He flexes his fingers, one by one. His hands are the smallest on the team. Everything about him is the smallest on the team.

On his twenty first birthday, Natsume calls him at three in the morning, and he answers because he'd been asleep and too groggy to check the caller I.D. That, and he hadn't wanted Saaya to wake up.

"—such a bad idea…" he catches the end of her sentence, and then the phone clicks off. Something electric shoots down him so fast and so hard, he arches the soles of his feet with it. Saaya turns her face into the pillow, and makes a soft, whining noise. Sasayan creeps over her, into the hall, and checks his call history to confirm what he already knows.

_As if_ he wouldn't recognize her voice.

He feels slightly disgruntled with himself for knowing it so immediately, truth be told. As his thumb moves to push down the call-back button, a jarring stitch of pain nails itself between the sinews of his shoulder, and he almost drops his phone. Irreparable damage. He remembers again, the frightening visibility of Natsume's bones, the last time he'd looked her up. Almost a year ago, now.

He thinks of Saaya, sleeping in his room. The loyal girlfriend, there for his birthday.

His shoulder hurts enough for him to switch his phone over to his left hand. Too far. He'd gone too far. Maybe Natsume knew about that, about pushing past a limit that was never meant to be passed. Maybe she knew.

He wonders if Natsume ever felt the same uneasiness he did, the same quaking sense that whatever he did was just slightly less than what was expected of him. His shoulder aches, and he can't tell anymore how far he can push it before it'll give out on him completely, before the pain spikes from something irritating to something _wrong_, something messed up.

He turns off his phone, and he takes a shower with the water on too hot, and the way his skin pricks is just right, and he walks out of the bathroom with his skin smarting and his stomach empty, and Saaya's gone, and the sun is coming up.

He watches it bleed pink across the sky. And then he calls Natsume.

"What are you doing calling me at this hour!" she snaps, and he hears nothing but nerves in her voice, nothing like real anger. He puts his hand against the glass of his window. He glimpses, abruptly, the farewell note Saaya had dashed off for him and quickly looks away.

Just as he's about to say, _I miss you_, Natsume breaks in hastily, "And don't say I called you first, I was—I was drunk, I was—shut up."

"Why weren't you sleeping?"

"How do you know I wasn't—?"

"I know."

She doesn't say anything for a moment. The sound of her breathing makes his own lungs swell, and stop, and swell.

"Your team is doing well. Fourth in the nation. I saw in the paper."

"It was in the paper?"

"_I looked it up online_," she snaps, words squished together in embarrassment. She is quiet for another second. "Happy birthday."

"I went to see you. Two years ago."

"I know."

"You didn't answer the phone."

"I know."

"Why?"

"Because," her voice almost breaks, "I can't do anything right."

* * *

The first time he sees her in four years: she is very, very thin, and he feels guilty. He reminds himself: he hadn't lied to Saaya. He hadn't done anything wrong. Just meeting and old friend for lunch. A lunch which, from the looks of it, only one of them would be eating.

"Why do you look like you're starving?" Sasayan asks bluntly. He eyes the boniness of her upper arms, poking out of her gauzy shirt. Natsume frowns at him defensively.

"I'm a _model_," she says, like he's a moron. He isn't a moron. He feels scared, the longer he looks at her. She'd always been a skinny girl, but not like _this_.

"What are you," he demands, "like thirty five kilos?"

"You shouldn't ask a girl about her weight," Natsume snaps. She folds her arms. Her elbows are so sharp they look like they could puncture balloons. Their waiter comes. She orders water. He orders steak. He needs the protein.

"Were you always left handed?" Natsume asks, watching him cut up his meat. She takes a sip. He sets aside five large steak-fries for her, and slides them across the table on a bread plate.

"My shoulder's kind of messed up."

She frowns at him, at his food. He's afraid of all her new secrets, her changes, her sudden decision to not tell him all her problems.

"If you don't eat those, we aren't leaving." Sasayan says.

"I can't."

"You're too skinny."

"I know I am," Natsume says. "But this is just part of my job."

He takes back two. She eats.

* * *

Two weeks later, halfway through his final exams, he gets the call from Haru.

He goes to the hospital a full five hours after she's collapsed, because of her attempted secrecy. When he walks in, Natsume looks frightened, and she tucks her arm tight against her side so he can't see the IV coming out her elbow, _as if_ he wouldn't notice the tube.

He sits on the edge of her bed and just looks at her until he can't anymore, then stares at the floor as hard as he can with his hands twisted into knots and snares and other things to catch her. "Please stop," he says to his shoes.

"Mitty said she wouldn't tell," Natsume whispers. Her voice breaks. He can't tell if it's because she feels betrayed, or if maybe a strange relief at having her secret revealed.

"Promise me you'll stop," he says again, and has to swallow.

Natsume gets quiet for too long. When he finally looks at her, he realizes that she's passed out, and he has to ring for the nurse. They let him stay through the night, and when she wakes up again at three in the morning, she starts crying because he hasn't left. "There's nothing special or good about me except my looks. I can't do anything else. I can't even get married and quit work because I hate cleaning, I can't cook, and I make people unhappy."

"That's mostly not true," Sasayan says. "And who the hell likes cleaning? You dope."

"I hate it that you can say things like that. I hate that you make it sound like things are so simple, so easy for me when they aren't. _They aren't_. You only think so because you like me."

He puts his tongue between his teeth, fights the heat from his face. He's out of practice. Saaya has never once made him blush, he realizes suddenly. "I see you're still full of yourself."

"No, I know I'm awful. But you have to like me. That's who you are to me."

He touches her wrist, and feels the feeble warmth of her skin struggling below his fingertips. All her freckles have faded and gone, and there is a new, sad thing in her look, and this too is instinctively familiar to him.

"Natsume," he says, suddenly exhausted, "I think I lost and I don't know what to do."

"Your arm?"

"How'd you know?"

"I told you, I looked you up online," as she speaks, the weakest flush darkens her cheeks, and she looks away. "Stupid. As if I could just stop caring."

He says nothing, but he doesn't let go of her either, and after a moment she mumbles, "Do you think I'm pathetic?"

"No," he says honestly.

"I feel like I'm always losing to you somehow. I didn't want to ask for any help."

"I don't think either of us are winning," Sasayan says honestly, and wonders what the last four years of his life have really meant—what his entire college experience has ultimately mattered towards shaping his future, now that baseball is over and he has some worthless degree and a few half-hearted job offers, and he and Saaya have already begun mincing around the idea of separating after college, as she's gotten an internship somewhere in America.

How terrifying, Sasayan reflects, as Natsume's eyes close and she slips back from consciousness, that one person could make everything else matter so little. How absolutely unfair.

* * *

After college, he moves back to parent's house for a month, and then gets a job at an office an hour away and nine train stops over. Natsume helps him pack up his boxes. She labels things carefully, and draws a different picture on every box. She's almost back to the same size as when she was in high school, and living at home is making her crazy.

"You can't leave me," she demands, even as she folds his shirts. Sasayan looks wryly over his shoulder at her, hoping she'll be embarrassed enough to back down, but she just glares back.

When he realizes she's serious, he's strangely touched. "You can come with."

"And sleep on your floor?"

"I could sleep on the floor."

Natsume makes a sharp, dismissive noise, and busies herself with fixing the tape. The opportunity is too good to pass up.

"Or neither of us could sleep on the floor," he says, quite innocently.

Natsume shoots him a dirty look, which surprises him. He'd expected a more violent reaction. He wonders, suddenly, if maybe she'd had some boyfriends of her own. Rich, older men looking for a tiny, model girlfriend. Sasayan briefly obsesses over the idea.

* * *

At his office, Sasayan's vaguely defined job seems to fall away in favor of smoothing out inner-office politics. Within the first week, he knows eight floor's worth of drama by heart, and has gotten so good at predicting when a feud is about to break out that the head of human resources starts calling him in for crisis management assistance, and several of the older women start hinting about introducing him to their daughters.

"The perfect job for you," Natsume announces, after he tells her over dinner. She takes the train to see him every other day, she insists it's because of a lack of anything better to do.

"My job is selling things on the phone."

"That was the trap," Natsume waves her hand dismissively, each fingernail painted painstakingly different colors. The hours slip past while they chat until it's suddenly too late for the last train home, and tomorrow's the weekend anyway, so Sasayan makes a nest for himself on the floor while Natsume scolds him for the scarcity of his apartment, which she proclaims to be, "Obviously a poor boy's room."

"If you don't shut up I'm taking the futon back," he threatens, and riffles through his drawers to find a shirt for her to sleep in.

"It's fine, just get over here!" she snaps, and turns sharply on her side, so that she faces the wall. She scoots to the far edge of the mat, leaving him too much room, and after a moment of consideration he lies down next to her, and listens to her breathe all night long, while their bodies slowly relax into one another.

After a month has passed and Natsume's filled half of his drawers with her own clothes and brought over several potted plants, he caves in and buys another futon. She yells that the stuffing isn't right, and refuses to leave his side, and Sasayan's always too cramped, and he never gets enough sleep, and he never tells her to leave.

* * *

His last brother gets married the same month Haru and Shizuku do, and within the same week Sasayan's first nephew is born. It is a very stressful period of time.

"What's wrong with you," his mother asks him while he tries to put on a tie and simultaneously make toast. "Aren't you ever going to get another girlfriend?"

"I'm holding out for true love," Sasayan tells her, heavy on the sarcasm. He flexes his shoulder, tries to roll out the kinks. He wakes up stiffer every day. His toast pops up dark and crispy. All three of his brothers laugh and call him a heartless brat, except then one of them drops the bomb by revealing that he's been living with Natsume for about four months.

His mother is appalled. "Her again? Is she splitting the rent?"

Sasayan mutters that the only thing being split is his mattress and his brothers all immediately know that he still isn't getting laid.

"It's just a matter of time, Mom," the third brother and recent honeymooner declares. "She's the one who'll ruin his life. There's no going back once you've found them."

Sasayan mulls this over until he next sees Natsume, at which point he immediately accuses her, "We still aren't a couple."

Her face squishes up.

"What? You don't want to?"

"Why can't we just keep doing what we're doing!" she snaps, and points an accusing finger toward him, "You always want more."

"You never give me enough," Sasayan mutters, which he thinks is fair, though by judging from her expression, it isn't.

"I _can't_," she stresses, and her face closes with inarticulate frustration. "I don't want to—I'm a careless girl, I go around smashing up feelings, I'm worried that if we go back to the way things were, something will happen, and everything will break apart just as soon as we've put it back together, but now there will be even more cracks than before."

This sounds suspiciously poetic for Natsume. Sasayan narrows his eyes, and steps towards her. She does not shrink away, though her eyes widen slightly.

"Did you read that in a magazine?"

"Shut up!"

"You can rip up my heart just so long as you take it."

Natsume explodes. "Don't you _ever_ say that!"

"Natsume." He reaches for her, and she slaps his hands down, her face flushing with anger.

"Don't give me that. I know all about love. I know all about doing wrong things on purpose and showing off your bruises and I know all about wanting to be hurt. Nothing is as good as a love that hurts because it's the only way we know of proving that it is—it is just as bad as we had suspected. Pain is the greatest affirmation of what we already knew. You want me to hurt you so that you can feel like you have somehow conquered inaction. You let me do it over, and over, and over again, and guess what? _Guess what?_ I _hate_ it. Do you know how it feels for the person cornered into hurting? Why do you _do_ this?"

His mouth works against his emotions, which are mysterious and complicated and the only thing he knows for sure anymore is that he still wants her, he has always wanted her, and it's true: she is the one who will ruin his life and she is the one who will make it.

"You make things very complicated."

"It's what I _do_," Natsume wails, and he smiles with all of his face for the first time in what feels like forever, because he remembers, finally, that she hates the color purple, but the taste of her lip gloss is sort of similar, and how about that?

When he lets her go she stammers, "The truth is that I don't know what I am without you. I mean, I know I'm still _me_ but that just isn't enough. It just isn't, because I know I'm supposed to be with _you_ and the me without you is just an excuse for what I should be and, and, does that make any sense?"

"Yes," Sasayan says, and he's older now. He's older and he's had some girlfriends so he isn't afraid to hold on, to touch her wrists, and her arms, her shoulders, her neck and stomach and breasts and her skin is just skin. A body is just a body, no matter how lovely, no matter how many times he forgot and relearned her.

"Why did you wait so long," she asks, her eyes bright. "You idiot, why'd you wait on me?"

"Shut up, you clearly waited too," Sasayan says, with the same forced irritation he could never really feel for her.

"I just felt like I was supposed to," she gasps a little when he nips at collar. "I just—I thought—I knew you would, I just didn't know why. I still don't know why."

"Because I could not survive you," Sasayan whispers, right into her ear, and she shivers and starts to say something back and he hisses, "Shh," and for a while, they are both quiet.

* * *

**NOTE3**: Okay, the truth is that I wrote all of this about a month ago, and it has been patiently sitting on my internet-barren laptop until just now. I'm working in literally the middle of no where for the rest of the summer, and getting to this coffee house requires two five hour bus rides, and camping by myself in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. So, yeah. I FELT REALLY BAD. Also I think everyone should appreciate how brave I am. I didn't even know how to set up that tent. But I did it. FOR YOU.

Anyway the reason I am mentioning this is my a way of letting you who follow my multi-chaptered pieces know: I'm probably going back to radio silence until the end of the summer. Sorry. I REALLY NEEDED THIS JOB. Being poor is hard.


End file.
